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Starting Up In Angola Is Akin To Being An Astronaut

It’s the day of the flight and you look at your fellow astronauts, each one with an anxious looking face that causes your heart to do some acrobatics inside your chest. Your stomach's feeling like Hiroshima after the equivalent of about 16 kilotons of TNT landed on it.

You begin to make your way to the space shuttle’s entrance each step feeling like a thousand miles and your mind rehearsing everything you had learned throughout your years of intensive training.

The sweat collecting in your palms like dew in the morning and what feels like Godzilla crushing a building is really your team mate's pat on your shoulder which rips you out of the vortex of fear and into a dimension of calm. His smile and enthusiasm sending wonderful vibrations into every cell of your body and causing dopamine to explode inside your brain. Leaving you excited about the journey you are on.

The similarities are endless, we research, plan, engineer, test and prepare to successfully launch and land a spaceship (product) that we hope might leave a crater on the world.

As a co-founder, I have to make good decisions for the good of the team and our product. It is important to be with co-founders you can express yourself with and get good feedback.

We practically breath and eat our startup, constantly learning more about startups, business, software engineering, development and implementing great ideas we learn from other startups into our own where we see the need and it’s being an incredible experience so far.

Starting up in Angola, where startups are not common and hardly supported by the government, makes things difficult.

Added to that is the fact that the mobile and tech market here in Angola is really in its infancy makes things a bit harder depending on how you see it but that in itself can be viewed as an opportunity too.

Unknown Variables

The spaceship (i.e. startup) you are on has just been slingshot into space like David’s stone into the air by a whopping amount of energy, but here you don’t know where Goliath is.

You look out the window as you make the transition out of the earth's atmosphere into a land of unknowns. Your training prepared you for life outside planet earth but everything feels different to the simulation you experienced during training.

That is how I feel right now. Our team is spending a huge amount of energy building our startup and planning for its success, but we don’t know exactly where we are heading to, we have never taken this flight before and we don’t know where to land.

So many things can happen on our journey to find Goliath's head in this galaxy made of billions of stars, but we are learning as we go.

Collecting data on our journey and finding ways to improve ourselves and I tell you it is really an awesome experience.

I thank my team members for being a pillar throughout this experience. I would like to come back to finish this story when I make my way back to earth safely with my team members all with me but for now I am on a learning experience and just at the beginning of the exploration of this land of unknown variables.

We might fail or we might succeed. No one knows. But we are pushing hard knowing that humanity depends on us to come back alive and well.

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